The Loss No One Talks About in Parenting a High Needs Child

**You can also listen to this in audio format only on The Regulated Mother Podcast on Apple or Spotify.

**Below is the blog article for easy reading.

When Motherhood Feels Nothing Like You Imagined

Have you ever looked around at your life and thought:
"This is not how it was supposed to be..."

I remember when I felt like my whole life was collapsing. My son was melting down daily and stopped going to school. My husband had a life-threatening health issue and had to leave his job. My own body broke down from the stress.

And I just kept thinking—this wasn’t the motherhood I signed up for.

I loved my child more than anything…
But I was grieving everything I had lost.
The freedom to rest.
The dreams I had for my child.
The version of myself I used to know.

No one had warned me that parenting a hypersensitive, high-needs child could feel like so much… loss.

This is part of a 3-part podcast/blog series on loss, grief, and growth in parenting a high-needs child. In this article/episode, I want to name the invisible losses that come with this parenting journey— and how simply naming them can help you understand why everything feels so hard…and give you permission to finally start to feel what you’ve been carrying alone.

When Everything I Built My Life Around Collapsed

There was a point in my parenting journey where everything I had built my life around began to collapse.

My son had become increasingly violent. He stopped going to school. Every day felt like a minefield of meltdowns and unpredictability.

Then my husband had a severe, life-threatening internal bleed and had to leave his corporate job. Overnight, our financial stability completely changed.

My own body broke down. I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I could barely function. I no longer recognized the mother and person I had worked so hard to become.

Everything that once gave me a sense of identity—motherhood, career, health, friendships, social life, and especially safety—was slipping through my fingers.

All I could feel was loss, loss, and more loss. My life as I knew it was withering away.  And in the darkest moments, I didn’t just feel lost… I felt like I wanted to disappear.  I had suicidal thoughts. I couldn’t see a way forward.

But slowly—through the unraveling, through the falling apart—I began to see something I wasn’t expecting…
I wasn’t just losing.
I was shedding.

Because parenting a hypersensitive, high-needs child often feels like losing everything we once believed would make us happy or fulfilled.

All the control we thought we had over our lives—over how motherhood would look—gets stripped away. And suddenly it feels like this entire parenting journey is just one painful loss after another.  You only see the pain. You only feel what’s been taken.

And when we can’t see or feel any gain from what we’ve lived through, it leaves us feeling like victims of an unfortunate circumstance.  And no one wants to feel like their child is an unfortunate circumstance.

Why We Need to Talk About Loss

So let’s talk about these losses.

Because unless we name them—unless we bring them into conscious awareness—the grief they carry will quietly shape the way we see ourselves, our children, and our lives.

When we don’t recognize what we’ve lost, we can’t begin to process it.

And if we don’t process it, it lives in our bodies, in our nervous systems, running the show from the shadows, keeping us stuck in survival mode.

So let’s take a closer look at what we lose, why it hurts so deeply, and why it might actually be the beginning of something much deeper than we ever expected.

The Many Layers of Loss We Experience as Parents

When you're raising a hypersensitive, high-needs, or PDA autistic child, the losses are multilayered:

The loss of identity — Who am I now? This is not who I imagined I would be as a mother or person… I feel like a shell of a human. This is what I often hear from the moms I work with.

The loss of the dream — Many of us have these dreams about motherhood—how things will be different from our own upbringing—we would show up differently for our kids, and have all these fun experiences. But instead, we’re navigating meltdowns, sensory overload, and crisis mode much of the time. And how about the dreams for our child’s future and how we imagined they would turn out? Those go out the window too.

The loss of control — We can’t change our kids or how they are wired… I often thought if I did everything right, I could help my child to be different. I thought if I found the perfect strategy or healed my own trauma fast enough, my child would feel better, behave better, and our life would be easier. But instead, our experiences leave us feeling like we have no control to affect change in our kids.

The loss of belonging — We don’t fit in with other families or spaces. I imagined connecting with other parents through shared experiences. Instead, I often feel like we’re on the outside looking in.

The loss of connection — Friends who drift, family who doesn’t get it. People you thought would show up disappear. Then there’s the loss of connection with your spouse or partner because you’re both in overwhelm.  And how about the loss of the connection you expected to have with your child…thinking they would always reciprocate your bids for connection and care.

The loss of health — Chronic stress and burnout take a toll on our bodies and our nervous systems get stuck in stress or shutdown.

The loss of joy — Activities that once brought lightness now feel loaded or impossible. Like vacations or even simple outings become a source of dread instead of delight.

The loss of career — Many of us have to leave our jobs or change our professional lives entirely to support a child who can’t attend school or tolerate typical systems. We give up financial stability, creative fulfillment, or the professional identity we once held.

The loss of freedom — The freedom to travel, be spontaneous, or simply to just take a break from it all and do what we need to care for ourselves—in our own homes! Our child’s need for constant co-regulation, autonomy and control can leave us feeling like we have no freedom to choose what we want for ourselves.

So that is a lot of loss I’ve just named.  If you are triggered right now, please take a moment to help yourself feel present—perhaps feel your feet on the floor, look around the room and notice something comforting, or even just bring a hand to your heart to offer yourself some compassion.

Why Our Brains Perceive These as Loss

So why does our brain perceive so much loss?

Your brain isn’t wrong for interpreting this as loss. It’s actually wired to do so.

We all have mental maps from childhood and society that define:

• What a "good life" or a "good mother" should be
  
  
• What success, safety, and belonging should look like
  
  

So when our parenting experience goes against those models, your brain says:
"This is wrong. This is unsafe. This is failure."

But that’s just programming. It’s not the truth. These thoughts are just reflecting our cultural conditioning.

What If What’s Dying… Is the Conditioning?

So here’s the question I invite you to ponder next…

What if the real loss here isn’t your life falling apart— but the unraveling of everything you were taught to believe would keep you safe, worthy, and successful?

What most of us call loss is often just the shedding of conditioning—the beliefs we inherited from family, school, religion, and culture that no longer serve us.

Beliefs like:

• A good mom is always calm, in control, and selfless
  
  
• A successful child is compliant, high-achieving, and independent
  
  
• A safe life is predictable, stable, and socially acceptable
  
  
• Love is something we earn by being good, agreeable, and easy to be around
  
  

When our kids don’t fit those expectations, we’re forced to confront how much of our identity was built on keeping those systems running.

And when those systems fall apart, we think we’re falling apart.

But what if you’re not falling apart?
What if you’re waking up?

Your Child Isn’t Breaking You—They’re Breaking the Pattern

Our children challenge the programming we’ve lived by.  They don’t follow the rules that we were taught to obey.  They push back against compliance, perfectionism, and performance.  And yes—it’s hard.  But they’re also inviting us into something far more honest.

They’re saying:
Stop pretending.
Stop abandoning yourself.
Stop forcing a life that doesn’t fit.

The Power of Seeing the Conditioning for What It Is

Once you recognize that what’s dying is the conditioning—not your truth—you begin to reclaim your power.

You get to ask:

• Do I actually believe this?
  
  
• Does this feel right for me and my child?
  
  
• What do I want to teach them about success, love, and belonging?
  
  

This is the beginning of living in alignment with your true values, not society’s.

The Invitation to Awareness

You are not your brain. You are the awareness behind it.

Start noticing:
"Oh... my brain is saying this is wrong. But maybe it's just different from what my brain learned and expected."

That awareness creates space to ask:

• Do I want to keep living through this lens?
  
  
• Is there something more authentic waiting to emerge?
  
  

So the invitation here is to notice and become aware of how your brain is automatically telling you that you are losing or failing… and be WITH it instead of taken over by those thoughts… notice it as an automatic thought that your brain is designed to generate—and this is not who you really are.

Then question it… really question it… Do you really want to live with beliefs that create more suffering for you and don’t allow you to show up with love and acceptance for yourself and your child?

Our children are here to help us challenge the generational conditioning we inherited.
They are not breaking us.
They are breaking the patterns.

What Comes After Naming the Loss? Grief.

And once we start to see it for what it is, a natural grief response can begin to emerge.

So many of us are grieving these losses—without even knowing it.

Because all this loss?  It’s not just about external circumstances.  It’s about the internal programming that told us what life “should” look like.

And when that programming starts to unravel, it’s not failure.  It’s an invitation.

In the next article/podcast, we’ll explore what happens when we begin to feel the impact of all we’ve lost. We’ll talk about how grief shows up in the nervous system, in our emotional cycles, and even in our childhood wounds.

We’ll explore the 5 stages of grief, the reality of ambiguous loss, and what it means to begin moving through it.

This next conversation may touch something tender—so be gentle with yourself.
But know this:
If you’ve been feeling heavy, overwhelmed, or even numb…
You’re not broken.
You’re grieving the loss that your brain is feeling.  This makes sense.
And you’re not alone.